[GUIDE] Warrior: Skill Intensive Tanking

[SatrinaKali]

Second Wind is garbage, drop it for Mantra or Haymaker. Provoke is very situational, 90% of the time I will be 2nd on threat and keep myself there if its a 2 tank fight, even if I have to run off to do something else. If the fight has me dealing with adds 100% of the time and the MT goes down, then yes Provoke works for that fight.

[Exrage]

Second Wind is garbage, drop it for Mantra or Haymaker. Provoke is very situational, 90% of the time I will be 2nd on threat and keep myself there if its a 2 tank fight, even if I have to run off to do something else. If the fight has me dealing with adds 100% of the time and the MT goes down, then yes Provoke works for that fight.

A lot of tanks feel that way about Second Wind, for lowbies grinding Mantra should be one of the last things they concern themselves with and Haymaker's damage/enmity is more of a joke than a 600+ clutch heal.

As for provoke- again, for the new players it's a skill they already have and it can save a PUG were an MT goes down, or your healer smashes the wrong heal, or your DPS starts a bit early, or... point being for the new guys it's ideal until they find themselves in a consistent team where few "oh shit" moments occur and they're free to use cross-class skills that feed into their raid's rotations more than their own.

[Exrage]

So a couple questions have been asked about what's more important gear wise for a tank: Should you focus on rings/necklace/etc as they're cheaper or should you focus on saving for the main body pieces as they provide higher stats?

For the sake of simplicity I would say the first piece that offers both things is your belt, all the damage resistance of main body pieces at the cost of your stat pieces. The next piece I would consider is +1 on your relic as it increases your damage/enmity/healing, then worry about AF2 main body pieces as you gain allagan from the Coils until you have a mix of the two before focusing on the accessories.

Note that this is a VERY situational question based on your tank, your team (or many of you the PUG), and how quickly you progress.

[Exrage]

Marking:
Maelwys made an excellent post on page 3, since I tend to run with my FC mostly I don't need to bother with it but I do have a mouseover (<mo>) macro that uses attack/bind/ignore depending on what modifiers I wish (alt/shift/tab or L1/L2/L3) collecting dust.

Bleeds:
Vengeance is a great one to use but most use it for a Wrath clutch ability. I tend to lean more toward the latter as most of my combos revolve around boss abilities and it's nice giving the healers 40% of my HP self-healed if my buffer will allow.

Fracture is a bit of a dark horse, it will add a percent or three to your DPS and round out your enmity per TP (e/TP) but is another independent variable that must be juggled between your rotations and is easily forgotten with very little detriment to your overall tank in comparison to more pressing rotations for the healers/raid.

[Disrupter]

Provoke is required. There's no way around it and that will become clear in Coil if it isn't already.
Second Wind isn't as useful as a mitigation cooldown in most cases.
Haymaker is great, but doesn't hit very hard for a Warrior. Use it if you don't have a Slow in the group already.
Featherfoot is good.
Awareness might be good, but there are no encounters requiring it.
Flash is also good, as position requirements for Overpower cause you to lose time picking up mobs, which kills your group.

[Exrage]

It's been asked how you can manage the adds AND tank the Dreadnoughts on the final phases of the elevator, it's actually pretty simple: Right through the middle of the raid.

He'll automatically eat the bugs off the DPS/healers while they can focus on whittling him or the Soldier/Rook down, but ultimately it's far easier to have a Dragoon/Monk worry about the lesser HP mobs.

[Braver]

First off i wanted to thank you for making this guide. Secondly I play the ps3 and just started creating marcos. I was just curious what would be in the aoe marco. Also when using marcos it eliminates the use for regular abilities correct? Sorry I really need a dumbers guide for this.

[Phreak]

It's been asked how you can manage the adds AND tank the Dreadnoughts on the final phases of the elevator, it's actually pretty simple: Right through the middle of the raid.

He'll automatically eat the bugs off the DPS/healers while they can focus on whittling him or the Soldier/Rook down, but ultimately it's far easier to have a Dragoon/Monk worry about the lesser HP mobs.

So run the dread through the raid group to get spiders so he can roto swipe the entire group? It's far easier just to ask your healers to stand behind the dread after it lands and have the bugs come to them after a medica spam or two.

[Vortok]

My issue with macros was based on how I observed they worked, which may've been inaccurate or there might be a workaround I'm unaware of.

What I saw when using them though, is that they won't queue the ability if you hit it before the GCD is up. With a standard ability you can hit it half a second or so before the GCD finishes and it'll fire off the moment it's able to. With a macro, it seemed to require me to wait until the GCD was finished and then hit the ability, which just results in inferior dps/threat/whathaveyou.

Unless I was just observing it wrong or there's a way around it, I can't justify macroing commonly used attacks.

[Exrage]

First off i wanted to thank you for making this guide. Secondly I play the ps3 and just started creating marcos. I was just curious what would be in the aoe marco. Also when using marcos it eliminates the use for regular abilities correct? Sorry I really need a dumbers guide for this.

To answer your first question, the AOE macro would probably consist of Flash and Overpower and would look like this:

/macroicon "Overpower"
/ac "Flash" <t>
/ac "Overpower" <t>

The problem is they both share the GCD and become available simultaneously so the macro isn't "sure fire" in that it will use Flash until you're out of MP and then use Overpower until you gain enough MP to Flash. Also yes, the point of Macros is to remove several abilities off your action bar and replace them with a single button that activates each of them- but you must make sure they do exactly what's needed when you need them to otherwise they become "clunky" along with your tank.